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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Getting Organized

Weird thing, but I have a dirty dark secret: While on the surface of things I look like a very tidy, together person (people often comment on how tidy our house is), if you open my drawers, you'd see another side. I don't know what it is, but I have never been good at organizing. I just fling things in drawers so you can't see them. I am forbidden from folding or putting away anyone's laundry but my own because I just roll things into balls and stuff them in. My desk isn't horribly messy, but open the drawers and things are disasterous.

Lately, however, this tendency is starting to have consequences, and now that I'm running a business, it is important for me to be organized. I am great with my client files, but other things have still been sliding, and the truth is, all the disorganization makes me anxious.

One area of our home that's been quite a mess for some time is our storage room in the basement. We hadn't cleaned it out in 7 years and we never bothered to get proper shelving or storage so it was being very inefficiently used. The result was that we could never find anything and there was eventually no room to even walk in it. Adam and I talked about getting someone in to help us with it because it just seemed so overwhelming, but the reality is, we don't have the money to throw around on things like that, that we can technically do ourselves.

Motivation to tackle this project came recently when my friend gave us all her old shelving, in perfect condition, after she and her husband had built-ins put in their basement. I finally decided it was time.

Now, I may have broken a bottle of red wine all over everything in my first 5 minutes of cleaning out the room, but things thankfully improved from there. It was a ton of work, and not particularly fun, but the result is worth it. I no longer feel stressed when I enter the room. I know where everything is and there is plenty of room to move.

I am pleased to say there was less stuff that needed to be thrown away than I feared - except all my notes and readings from 4 years as an undergrad - and not even as much to be given go Goodwill as I thought. The area just really needed to be tidied up.

Unfortunately, my loving family wasn't terribly grateful. The girls complained about how the room now smells like red wine, and Adam simply criticized where I put everything and told me he will eventually have to organize the room 'better'. Ha, no good deed goes unpunished! Well, too bad, I still am very proud of myself.

Here are the before shots:

And her are the afters...which honestly don't do it justice:

There is actually quite a bit of empty shelf space...dare I say we finally might be able to take our remaining wedding gifts from my in-laws house!